Why has ISIS still not been defeated even after a year?

America, the whole Western world really, is kind of like that kid. And the ant, well I think you are smart enough to know that is one of those jihadist terrorist murdermongers. Like the kid with his glass, we send over our multimillion dollar planes on their many thousands of dollar sorties, to drop a few $80,000 missiles to kill a few bad guys armed with AK-47s hiding in a hole. It is a massive, massive difference in force being brought to the table. That’s awesome, right? I mean, realistically, what could that ant really do to the kid?

Well, it doesn’t take a genius to realize where the strategic problem here lies. We won’t win the war on the “ants” by killing a few of them individually with our multimillion dollar “magnifying glasses”. Honestly, once the kid realizes that everywhere he looks, there is going to be a few more ants, he’s going to get bored, and eventually, he’s going to get bit by one of those little suckers he never saw coming in for a cheapshot. Mom will probably go into a panic and make the kid come back into the house. “I killed 10 ants.” The little boy proclaims to an ambivalent family. A doting Mom might even say, “Oh, good job son. You can do no wrong.” never thinking of the ants in her yard again.

The truth is that Mom, the family, and the little boy don’t get what has become obvious to everyone else. There is an infestation going on which is going to have to be handled by taking out the mounds.

Now we run into enough problems that I am going to drop the analogy momentarily. After all, killing an ant mound would involve something like dousing the mound in some lethal poison or putting out traps to poison the queen, which I am pretty sure the human comparison is laying down a cloud of chemical weapons gas or poisoning the water supply. I think that is a bad idea, genocide you know… just to be clear.

It does need to be said that there is a mound that does exist. What makes it so difficult to defeat, in this case, is the fact that this isn’t a physical mound that we could even just wipe off the map. This is a “anthill of ideas” or to paraphrase Sam Harris, “The Motherlode of Bad Ideas“.

To put some data to that statement, here is a graph of a poll done in the Middle East of mostly Arab Muslims. While the world should still delight that most the graph is red, it still showed that as many as 11% of Muslims in that region actually support what the IS is doing.

If you were to say that these percentages held true for the entire Muslim population that would be around 140 million people. So that you know, that couldn’t be said thirty years ago, so something is going on terrible in that part of the world.

Ok, now we have a broader understanding of the problem. We aren’t just dealing with the terrorists who are dressed up like, well, terrorists.

We are actually dealing with fanaticized populations who are either all being systematically converted, or, more than likely, are too terrified ( i.e. terrorism) to speak out against the ruling regime. That means, getting back to that, “You can’t trust the locals” idea, that everyone in the region is complicit with the Islamic State, like I said, either because they are fundamentalists or because they are simply trying to buy their security through favors to the madmen who have proven over and over that they would kill them if they didn’t.

Circling back to happy metaphors, that means that 90% of these ants you see below, are actually good people; terrified people, but good people nonetheless. 2% are no holds barred murderous terrorists. The 8% or so remaining are just wrong headed and given maybe a few more generations, might see that throwing homosexuals from three story buildings is socially unacceptable. That said, all 100% of them, in some capacity, are furthering the aims of the Islamic State, whether through willful alliance or forced submission. With that in mind can you spot the terrorists?

No, but because of the 90% of the people who haven’t yet been purged through annihilation or forced refugee status, we can’t exactly go the way of the Amdro option. In case you don’t realize, Amdro is a powerful fire ant killer that wipes out whole mounds dead with a chemical cocktail of 10,000 kinds of unnatural unpleasantries. If you’re slow, I’m making an allusion to the nuclear option, or as some people have said in dumber parts of the internet, “Glassing That Desert”. Speaking of depraved acts of callousness, by the way, a recent Amnesty International report currently showed that something like 1 in 120 people alive today are living in refugee status, and no one seems to care unless I write a post with cute ant cartoons.

That’s why so many people like me are so very disappointed with the overall work done by the White House and the State Department over the last six years to quell these exponentially growing international disturbances.

Look, it was made obvious to me growing up since sex ed class, pulling out is never an adequate form of protection. As an Iraq vet, now watching the region I served in overrun by terrorists, I can’t help but ask why it was allowed that after years of bringing that country into a state of order, it was allowed to descend back into utter chaos though negligence of the highest order. Yes, it was in a state of order when we left, which is proven most ironically by the very site dedicated to showing how much we failed there.

Now, the website iraqbodycount.com is publishing data showing that some areas of Iraq are facing worse carnage than they ever experienced during the Bush era.

17,049 civilians have been recorded killed in Iraq during 2014 (up to Dec 30). This is roughly double the number recorded in 2013 (9,743), which in turn was roughly double the number in 2012 (4,622). These numbers do not include combatant deaths, which even by the most cautious tallies have also seen a sharp rise in 2014.

Yet, we still have no plan. What’s worse, is that the movement being carried on by the Islamic State is one which is easily spreading outside of Iraq and Syria. Now, IS militants are attacking and pushing out major population groups in Libya more than two thousand miles away from Iraq and separated by at least three countries. I honestly don’t know why people aren’t talking about this more.

While the President’s team has surrounded himself with a lot of very good press recently, it just seems like there isn’t time to deal with what is, realistically, the most vital issue threatening world security today. In the words of his current Secretary of State, John Kerry, made in one of the most outlandishly uncalled for attacks on the single group of Americans doing the most to prevent the spread of fundamentalist terrorism, the United States military:

“You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

Well, the administration hasn’t done their homework and they haven’t made an effort to be smart, so now, as Kerry predicted in 2006, they’re stuck in Iraq.